What is everyone else using for VPN solutions and what are the trade offs?
I want a VPN to access all my personal devices and use services like Syncthing. I use it on my phone so it can’t use ungodly amounts of idle data.
I looked at Netbird but found the idle data usage almost 1GB per few days using JetBird with Lazy connections. I tried the default app but it makes me SSO login every day or two, it wouldn’t stay connected, and it still used a reasonable amount of idle data.
I looked at Tailscale but I’m not going to lock access to all my devices behind a Google account login or some other third party service login for no reason. It seems like hosting my own auth server is too much additional risk as well. I tried self hosting headscale which worked well except that I have no decent front end to easily add devices. I have to log into a terminal, then execute docker commands which was a huge pain in the ass. I didn’t even touch on any of the firewalling or routing that can be done because it was so much more complex in headscale then in a web interface. I tried hosting two or three headscale front ends but couldn’t get one working that supported most of the available feature set. Usually I was given generic connection errors with no clear way to diagnose or clear troubleshooting steps so after a few hours I moved on.
I use Proton’s VPN.
Issues I’ve observed: timeouts and extra (sometimes excessive) “are you human” verifications, extra step on troubleshootings if a site doesn’t load properly or at all, sites load slower, connection may not even work when it’s morning in Russia and China or if the server is in a country being bombarded (e.g. Iran’s former allies) or possibly also going through some natural disaster, some sites may hardcode your VPN region to your account if you stay in a given IP too much (e.g. Crunchyroll), and some sites block VPN IPs they know about (e.g. Nijimiss.moe, part of the fediverse, and GameFAQS).